The Last Concubine (45 page)

She carried his toggle tucked into her obi. When she was alone she brought it out, raised it to her nose, inhaled his smell. Now she felt it there, pressing against her stomach.

If only there was some way to get a message to him, to tell him that the castle had been occupied, that she was not going to die. But she couldn’t even tell him where she was going because she didn’t know herself.

Taki’s voice broke into her thoughts.

‘Please, my lady,’ she squeaked. ‘Something different, I beg you. Play something different.’

Sachi was playing one of the songs they used to sing when they went to view the cherry blossom. She came back to the present with a start and pushed the koto away. The memory of those happy times was too much to bear.

Already the palace was starting to feel deserted. Haru and Taki were rushing around in a panic, packing as quickly as they could. Carefully they lifted a last kimono off its rack. It was white with a pattern of phoenixes woven into the cloth. With every movement of the fabric fragrance wafted through the room, a complex scent of eight or nine different ingredients – sandalwood, myrrh, a heady hint of fragrant spikenard oil on a base of aloe, with a grace note of some secret ingredient that only the princess knew. The scent took Sachi back to the day when His Majesty had made his last visit to the women’s palace. It was the gown the princess had worn that day. Sighing and brushing away tears from their cheeks, the women smoothed the beautiful robe, then folded it, wrapped it in paper, put it in a drawer and laid it gently in a trunk.

Footsteps sounded in the distance. Men, stomping unceremoniously through the palace. The women bowed their heads in resignation. They must show a strong face to these intruders.

The doors slid open. Daisuké. This man who claimed to be . . . who was . . . Sachi’s father. He strode in, tall and burly and commanding, followed by a party of uniformed soldiers.

Sachi stared at the floor as a terrible idea occurred to her. Maybe everything that had happened was her fault? Maybe it was she, the offspring of an unnatural union of high and low, the shogun’s concubine and a low-class townsman, who had brought this ill fortune on the palace. Maybe it was because of her that these southern barbarians – low-class samurai and townsfolk so base they barely counted as humans – swarmed like a plague of rats into every corner of the magnificent halls.

‘We are under orders to inspect the chambers,’ said Daisuké. Sachi detected a note of apology in his voice. Even the princess’s chambers? Surely not. Even these loutish southerners could not be so ignorant of the proper order of things.

Daisuké clapped his hands and men of the merchant class appeared, bobbing and bowing timidly outside the door. In the old days undermaids of undermaids would have gone to the gates to deal with such creatures. Never in a million years would these men have dreamed of setting foot within the sacrosanct precincts of the palace. They would have been dead, their heads severed from their shoulders, if they had even thought of it.

Now here they were in their merchants’ garb, dull and drab as the rules required but with a flash of gold at the cuffs, a reminder that for all their grovelling humility they were hugely rich. They crept in, trembling, on their hands and knees, rubbing their noses along the matting, bowing again and again. Every now and then they twisted their heads to steal a glance at the forbidden interior and even more forbidden women. The women shrank back and turned their heads away, trying to conceal their faces from these vulgar eyes.

Servants scurried behind the merchants carrying lengths of silk.

‘To make your days of seclusion more endurable,’ said Daisuké as he presented the gifts to Haru and Taki.

One servant held a cage of finest paulownia wood, exquisitely
carved and embossed, fitted with opaque paper screens in rose-wood frames. A tiny brown bird crouched in the shadows. It cocked its head, blinked a black eye and trilled out a plangent melody, slow and sweet, rising to a passionate warble. In the gardens a wild nightingale took up the song.

‘A good omen,’ said Daisuké, smiling. ‘Nightingales never sing when people are watching. But he sings for you.’

Sachi bowed. The little bird’s plight reminded her all too fiercely that she too was about to lose her freedom. She murmured a poem:

For a moment she looked up at this face – her father’s. The sags and bags were kindly but there was something disturbing about him too. It was the way he looked at her, she thought, the fiery intensity of his eyes.

There were other gifts – an urn of the finest Uji tea, boxes of rice cakes stuffed with bean jam, last season’s Edo oranges. Sachi had been dreading this visit, fearful he was going to make demands, try to persuade her to do this or do that. But he didn’t. They sat in silence, puffing on long-stemmed pipes, listening to the nightingale’s song. Little by little she was getting used to his presence.

Haru was leaning forward, gazing at Daisuké bright-eyed as if she was afraid that if she once took her eyes off him he would disappear back into the shadows from which he had so unexpectedly emerged. Every now and then Taki glanced at her with a frown of irritation on her thin face but Haru seemed not to care.

‘It must be . . . eighteen years!’ she said suddenly, then clapped her hands over her mouth and turned a deep shade of red, glancing around as if the words had burst out of their own accord.

‘You weren’t much more than a child when I saw you last,’ said Daisuké, smiling. ‘You haven’t changed, not one bit.’

Haru flushed even redder. Sachi smiled to herself at the thought of plump-cheeked Haru, with her heavy face and forehead covered in fine lines, being like a child.

Daisuké was staring into the distance.

‘This palace,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘I used to come here even when I was just a boy. Climbing around the roofs – roof after roof after roof. Checking the lead tiles – hundreds of thousands of them. Then there were the beams, the support pillars, the joists, the floors, the transepts . . . There was so much that needed seeing to. My father was so proud we had the contract. We had the sign outside our shop: “By appointment to the shogun”.’

‘We weren’t supposed to see you,’ said Haru. Her round face was wreathed in smiles. ‘As far as we were concerned you didn’t exist. That was the theory, anyway.’

The faintest of scents spiked the air, a mysterious silky odour like the perfume of some great lady. Musk, aloe, wormwood, frankincense . . . The candle flames flickered and a whorl of dust spiralled in a corner. Was someone else there with them? A beautiful woman dressed in the gorgeous overkimono of a concubine?

Sachi sat still, her hands folded in her lap. She had been expecting Daisuké to bombard her with questions and arguments, to try to get to know her, justify why he had taken the path he had. She had sworn to herself she wouldn’t speak to him, but now, when he sat so quietly, she found questions bubbling up inside her.

‘Did you really carry me through the mountains?’ she whispered shyly. His face lit up as if he was amazed and delighted she had spoken to him at last. She looked down quickly and stared at the floor.

‘You were such a little thing, so tiny and so light,’ he said in his gruff tones. ‘Your mother had wrapped you in her overkimono. I bundled you up, brocade and all, in a scarf and tied you to my back. I was afraid someone might question me at a checkpoint. They would have if they’d seen the brocade. They’d have thought I was stealing a daimyo’s child – a beautiful baby like you, with your face like a pearl. They’d have thrown me in prison and taken you away. They’d have tried, anyway.’

He bunched his big fists for a moment. A shadow of a grin lit the corners of his mouth and gleamed in his eyes.

‘And so you got to my village . . .’ Sachi said in a tiny voice.

His face softened.

‘I’d never met those good folk, I only knew they were my relatives. But it felt like home. I was afraid you might die, a newborn child like you, but you were well wrapped up.’

‘It’s here,’ breathed Haru. ‘My lady has it still. The brocade. My lady her mother’s . . .’

She had brought it out from its drawer and it lay folded beside her like a little piece of the sky, blue and shimmering, exuding its delicate perfume. There was no ghost there, only the brocade.

Daisuké’s brow furrowed as he reached out and laid his big carpenter’s hand on the delicate fabric. He picked it up, held it to his cheek, inhaled the scent.

‘You. Your perfume,’ he murmured. ‘You are here with us. Not a day has passed, not a moment, when I haven’t thought of you, when I haven’t prayed for you.’

He looked at Sachi as if suddenly remembering she was there and smiled. She hadn’t noticed before what a reassuring smile he had – a fatherly smile, she thought to herself uneasily.

‘She was a fine woman, your mother,’ he said softly.

‘Was she like me?’ whispered Sachi.

‘Just like you,’ he said. ‘Full of life. And very brave. She didn’t care about anything. This world she lived in, this palace full of hatred and snobbery and in-fighting – it was like a prison for her. She hated it. I wanted to take her away from it. If I could, I’d take you too. But it’s all over now.’

‘All over for who?’ Sachi glared at him. ‘For the shoguns? For the Tokugawas? You’re wrong. The war isn’t over yet.’

‘Maybe. But we can never go back to the old ways where men die at a word from their lord or kill others without a thought because it’s what the clan orders. It was that rigid system that forced us apart, your mother and me. Before we met I never thought about anything except getting up in the morning, doing my job, keeping on the right side of the shogun’s police.

‘We were from different castes, you know that. What we did was a crime. The only choice we had was to kill ourselves
together like people do in the old plays. But I’m not a samurai. I’m not so eager to die.’

Silence fell across the gathering like a pall. Even the little bird had stopped its singing. Sachi thought of her mother. Her presence was almost palpable – her brightness, her laughter, her mysterious smile.

‘You talk about her as if she’s dead,’ she faltered.

Daisuké looked at Haru. In the candlelight his face was haggard. Haru was staring at the tatami.

‘So what did you do after you left my lady at the village?’

Everyone whirled round. It was Taki. It was the first time she had ever addressed Daisuké.

‘I’ve been to the village too, you know. With my lady. We heard about you there. We heard you had passed through.’

‘Well . . .’ said Daisuké slowly, returning to the present. His face relaxed. ‘I ended up in Osaka. I settled down. I found work. It wasn’t so hard, I had a trade.’ He looked at Sachi, held her in his gaze as if she was a precious treasure. ‘I wanted to get you back but I had to be able to support you first. Whenever I had spare money I sent it to your parents. I wanted to become a father you could be proud of, then I’d come and claim you.’

She looked at him. He had tears in his eyes.

‘The years went by. I struggled. Then the Black Ships came.’

‘Bringing the foreigners.’

He nodded. ‘Bringing the foreigners.’

Sachi remembered when she was a child, growing up in the village, hearing of the Black Ships that had anchored, belching smoke, off the coast at Shimoda and disgorged a delegation of red-haired barbarians. It was the first time barbarians had ever stepped on to Japanese soil, apart from a small group of Dutch merchants who lived on an island off Nagasaki, a good way from Edo. After that no one had been able to stem the tide. Many samurai had made it their business to cut down foreigners whenever they could, though they had often had to pay with their heads for it. Now, of course, Sachi had met foreigners herself and discovered they were not so fearsome after all.

‘I had made new friends by then,’ said Daisuké. ‘Good men, brave men. They didn’t care what caste I was. High-level samurai,
low-level samurai, peasant, townsman – there was room for all of us. We spent night after night talking politics. Most were from down south – a long way from Edo. It’s a lot freer down there, where the shogun’s grip is not so tight.’

‘We know about those southern lords,’ said Sachi softly. ‘They’re the ones who started all the trouble.’

‘They could see that the country had to change, that there were foreigners right here, on our sacred soil. We all felt the same about that. We read books, we read news sheets. We knew they’d carved up China and India and other countries beyond the seas. If they had half a chance they’d grab our country too, that was for sure. But the government – this government . . .’ Daisuké gestured around at the empty room, the cobwebs glistening faintly in the corners.

Sachi frowned. For a moment she could see it through his eyes – this world of women with their lives of luxury and privilege; the innocent young shogun, so weak, so ignorant of everything, dependent on his advisers . . . Angrily she pushed away the thought.

‘The government didn’t seem to understand the peril,’ said Daisuké. ‘Or maybe it was too weak to drive them out. We realized it was time for change, time to give power back to the emperor. “Restore the emperor and expel the barbarians.” That was our slogan. Those were our aims.

‘Suddenly it seemed that we – carpenters like me, ordinary people – could make a difference. Instead of just earning money, spending money, worrying about money, we could change the world, make it a better place. It actually seemed possible.’

Sachi shook her head. When she was growing up she hadn’t even known there was an emperor. Each daimyo – all two hundred and sixty of them – ruled his own domain and over them all, keeping peace in the whole great land of the Rising Sun, was the shogun. That was how it had always been.